Schlagwort-Archive: Erfahrung

“…there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave…” – W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

It was 1903 when Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk wrote that, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” At this time, African Americans had gained emancipation from slavery, suffrage, and access to education, but their promise was extinguished by the principle that people of color were ultimately “equal but separate.” For Du Bois, the continued presence of the color line produces the “strange experience” for African Americans of “being a problem.” The problem of the color line, the division of the races, replicates itself as a “vast veil” that produces “double-consciousness,” the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Weiterlesen →